"Disturbers of the Peace" : Lynda Van Devanter's Home Before Morning: The Story of an Army Nurse in Vietnam and W.D. Ehrhart's Passing Time: Memoir of a Vietnam Veteran Against the War

Vol.36,No.2(2010)

Donna Coates

Stable URL (handle):
http://hdl.handle.net/11222.digilib/105067

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Abstract
In the late 1960s, Lynda Van Devanter and W. D. Ehrhart volunteered to serve in the Vietnam War as nurse and combatant respectively. Both believed they were part of a generation of Americans who had been chosen to save the world, but both quickly discovered that they had been profoundly ignorant and naïve, for what their government had promised in the name of liberty, freedom, and democracy was none of those things. In their memoirs, both writers expose the questionable nature of the American government's mission in Vietnam, lay bare the explicit policies that jeopardized and undermined the psychiatric health of American soldiers and military nurses, and take aim at the military for not having done everything it could to insure that protective mechanisms had been put in place before sending young Americans into harm's way. Van Devanter's and Ehrhart's memoirs document the extent to which they were traumatized by their wartime experiences and record their long and painful journeys to recovery. Both writers thus fulfill what trauma theorist Kali Tal refers to as "the urge to bear witness, to carry the tale of horror back to the halls of 'normalcy' and to testify to the people the truth of their experience."

Keywords:
trauma; trauma theory; the Vietnam War; representations of the enemy; the plight of the returned soldier/nurse

Pages:
39–60
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